a consciousness not yet considered

The local job fair was held at the bus station, west of the center of town near the wax museum. Much to the annoyance of travelers, hundreds of job hopefuls filled the seats across from the toilets and ticket counters, muttering their CVs into the air for strolling headhunters to hear. I caught phrases such as “I play for the team” and “my strength is dedication plus patience” and “my greatest weakness is also a strength” and “I’m a fast learner.” The headhunters paused and craned over the prospective employees whose CVs they liked and handed out business cards. Those favored with a card were maybe one in seventy-five. A week ago I had been one such. After mumbling that I was adaptable and likeable, I called a man listed as Dux Lux on his card. Today, I was back at the bus station on Dux’s payroll. 

The man I was watching wore a yellow shirt. He was my quarry. I sat close enough to hear his CV and match mine to his. When he said he was flexible and punctual, a bearded headhunter in a trench coat stopped to listen and soon handed him a contact card. That was my cue to say I was flexible and punctual too. I did, and the bearded headhunter came to attention. As he bent over me, tilting his ear to hear better, I added that I was reliable and relatable, a self- starter, and a good closer. He was hesitant but still listening, so I pulled out the stops. I pantomimed a man who had lost his job and was heartbroken, using the facial expressions and hand movements of a street mime I had once seen and studied over the course of several days. The headhunter then handed me a card also. I observed it wasn’t Dux Lux’s card, which I would have tossed into a waste receptacle, but someone else’s this time. That was good. 

By the time yellow shirt received two cards, I had just the one, but mine was a duplicate of one of his. When he stood up to leave the bus station, no doubt thrilled to have garnered so much attention, I pointed to the card in his hand that was different from mine, that said Stan’s Tires. I said, “Don’t work there, my friend, I did and they fired me without cause in three weeks.” He nodded his head, I think in relief, and walked away. It was all a lie, I had never worked at soul-sucking Stan’s Tires. I wondered why he didn’t want to talk more with me, go for coffee for instance and chat about hard times, but he seemed in a hurry. I noticed he needed a shave, probably a shower, and at least one tattoo removal. I let him go, betting I’d see him later. 

“So your name is Hegel?” he asked me when we started working together at a small firm. He had changed his yellow shirt for a green one on this occasion. “Yep,” I said, “Hegel, Bill Hegel.” He asked if that was Scandinavian and I said no, it was German. But he knew that already, the faker, because his next question was, “Like the philosopher Hegel?” At the same time, he finger-flicked a candy wrapper into my face. We were sitting way too close to each other, he having rolled his chair next to mine. “I can smell your nougat breath,” I told him, pushing my chair away. 

“What won’t kill you makes you stronger,” he said, fingering the air to form quotation marks around his words.

I turned away and stared at my computer screen. His breath still bothered me, not to mention that he was quoting the wrong philosopher. Hegel would have said, “The history of humanity is the history of the consciousness of freedom, and man, your breath is ripe.” Already I was getting input from Dux about my coworker, his green shirt stained with candy by now. He hadn’t introduced himself to me, but Dux referred to him as Smythies. “Smythies will likely start off with his usual tricks, mailing payments from your company to a fraudulent account,” wrote Dux. “He may try to enlist you as a recipient of the misdirected funds. Don’t worry about this and facilitate it if it’s convenient. We’ve breached his computer and are tabulating his embezzlements.” 

“What do these people want with you?” I asked Smythies, showing him Dux’s email. “No idea,” he said after reading it. “Listen, I need your help. I’m taking time off work to smuggle a Canadian baby across the border into the US. I’ve visited Peru, Guatemala, China, and Brazil, but I’ve settled on Canada as the child’s donor country. With your help, I’m going to raise him as my own son here in America. Here’s what I want you to do. In two weeks meet me at the border in Buffalo New York at the Maid of the Mist boat ride below Niagara Falls. I’ll be the man in the yellow raincoat. Approach me and help me get me and my boy into a taxi.” When I arrived on time a week later, I saw the joke Smythies had pulled on me. Everyone, men women and children in the hundreds, wore yellow rainwear for the Maid of the Mist ferry ride, to shield them from the cascading mist from the falls. But I picked him out right away, since his yellow raincoat stood out like a diseased nose from everybody else’s, all of theirs being transparent trash bag-like pullovers with Maid of the Mist stenciled on them while his was bulky, had pockets, a belt, a collar, hung down below his knees, and was unlettered. Also, he was carrying a small child, an infant from the looks of it. Beneath the infant’s thin plastic wrapper I could make out a tiny jacket embossed with a maple leaf. 

“You’re not terribly bright, are you, Hegel?” he said when I explained my initial confusion regarding the raincoats. 

“That’s not the half of it,” I said, laughing along with him. “I still don’t know what my assignment is regarding you and Dux. And here I am helping you evade border security.” “You really are a dimwit, Hegel,” he said, still laughing, “this is what he wants you to do to me.” Here he mimed dragging a dagger across his throat. In case I didn’t get the picture, he mimed firing a handgun into his temple. In case I still didn’t get it, he mimed a man hanging from a noose. If that wasn’t enough, he gave a thumbs-down. Seeing me still confused, he mimed an accident at a virology lab in Wuhan, a man such as himself taking a long airflight to the US, and that man then dying over the course of several grueling days on a hospital respirator. He must have studied the same street mime I had, he was so good. Anyway, I told Smythies I was quitting Dux. 

“Where to, gents?” asked the cabbie, grown impatient while we dithered in the back seat with a cooing baby between us. 

“You know, I’ve thought of where I want to raise my boy,” said Smythies. “I’m thinking of a place where the air is sweetened by pristine forests, and the water flows clear without contaminants. A place where Junior will grow up having the right to bear arms, and our next door neighbor plays drums all night and cuts tile on a bandsaw. He could be our boy, yours and mine,” he added, smiling at me, “if you’d care to co-parent.” I was taken aback. Did I care to co parent, he was asking me without warning? Did I wish, out of the blue, to be a second father to the coochie choochie cutsie baby guy-o asleep beside me? That was like asking if I wanted 

meatballs with my spaghetti. It was like asking if I wanted nerve gas before a dental exam. It was like asking if I enjoyed being beaten over the buttocks with a stout board as I lay prone in bed. “I’m in,” I said, “provided we name him Wayne, after the hockey great, and I get weekends off and a library card.” 

“Might I suggest south Dearborn as your home?” said the cabbie, Hammurabi Cantor by his nametag. “One of the Beatles lived there, Keith, I think.” 

“Coolio!” cried Smythies. “To the bus station, driver, and step on it.”